IPB Adventure, Practice Optional

We have a terrible track record when it comes to attending NHL practices. We’ve had the distinct pleasure of sitting through an optional game-day skate in Buffalo that featured a grand total of six Amerks and Andrew Peters, and on this past Saturday we spent three hours freezing our fannies on the bleachers at South Mountain Arena so we could take in the sights and sounds of exactly zero players taking the ice. So when Pookie decided to take a day off from work so we could make the long drive back up to West Orange today, we should have expected the worst. Well, call us optimists (or people who don’t learn from our mistakes), but we had high hopes. We also came prepared — after spending over five practice-less hours lurking at the rink over the weekend, this time we brought a travel cribbage board.

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Reasons We Love Hockey Part 116

The 116th in our 118-part series.

Blogging

What are two girls to do if they have, over the course of over a decade of hockey fandom, met only a paltry few people with whom to share their thoughts on this wonderful game? Well, in our case, we spent most of that decade-plus grumbling unhappily about the dearth of fellow hockey-enlightened people in our lives. But recently technology caught up with us — first we found the marvels of the hockey blogosphere, then we realized that one doesn’t need any kind of credentials to jump right into said blogosphere. All it takes is having a lot to say, or maybe in our case, not a lot to say but lots of words to say it with.

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Reasons We Love Hockey Part 115

The 115th in our 118-part series.

The Hockey Blogosphere

For the last 12 years or so, we’ve been living in a veritable Plato’s Cave when it comes to hockey. We’ve been watching the projections on the walls — games, playoffs, championships, highs and lows, great plays and great players, bone-headed mistakes and disastrous trades, everything that’s made up the NHL over that span — but for all we knew these events were only shadows, and nothing more. By dint of having almost no friends who like hockey, and by dint of having so little faith in the MSM’s ability to correctly and interestingly analyze the game, we’d been reduced to watching our favorite sport in a vacuum. And then a beautiful thing brought us out of the Cave and into the brave new world of engaging in and interacting with the hockey universe — the hockey blogosphere.

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